Former Bush official: US detainee abuse 'unprecedented'

A former US official has accused the administration of George Bush, the former president, of authorizing "unprecedented" acts of abuse during the interrogation of terror suspects. Phillip Zelikow told a US senate hearing on torture practices that the Bush administration was guilty of a "collective failure" over the interrogation of "war on terror" detainees. "The US government over the past seven years adopted an unprecedented program in American history of cruelly calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment to extract information," Zelikow said on Wednesday. "This was a mistake, perhaps disastrous one. It was a collective failure in which a number of officials and members of congress and staffers of both parties played a part, endorsing a CIA program of physical coercion." The Bush administration has been widely criticized for allowing the use of "waterboarding", which simulates the sensation of drowning, sleep deprivation and other interrogation methods, all practices heavily criticized by human rights groups. Zelikow, who served as an aide to Condoleezza Rice, the former US secretary of state, also testified that in 2006, former administration officials sought to collect and destroy copies of a memo he wrote opposing those methods. "I heard the memo was not considered appropriate for further discussion and that copies of my memo should be collected and destroyed."